The present invention relates generally to wireless communication systems and, in particular, to data transmissions over wireless communications systems.
The Internet boom has sparked the need for transmitting data at high speeds. This need for high speed data transmission has been met by service providers of wireline communications systems, but not by service providers of wireless communications systems. Currently, there are proposals for developing a wireless communications system based on Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) technology having communication channels over which data may be transmitted at high speeds (hereinafter referred to as data or supplemental channels). However, dedicating spectrum resources to data channels would be inefficient due to the bursty nature of data transmission. In other words, data is transmitted in bursts followed by periods of inactivity where no data is transmitted. To have spectrum resources dedicated to data channels during these periods of inactivity would be inefficient utilization of spectrum resources. Accordingly, there exists a need for a wireless communications system that utilizes spectrum resources more efficiently in the presence of data channels.
The present invention is a method for efficiently utilizing spectrum resources belonging to a wireless communications system having data channels for high speed data services. The present invention employs a discontinuous data transmission technique to more efficiently utilize spectrum resources. The discontinuous data transmission technique involves the transmission of a flag over a control channel (or some other communication channel) in frame f, wherein the flag would indicate to an intended recipient that a transmitter has a data frame to transmit to the recipient in some future frame f+q. In an embodiment, the transmitter would subsequently transmit the data frame over a data channel (or some other communication channel) in frame f+q if the flag indicated that the data frame was ready to be transmitted. In another embodiment, the transmitter would not transmit the data frame unless the recipient has indicated (via another flag transmitted over a control channel in an opposite direction) that the recipient is ready to receive the frame of data from the transmitter.
Advantageously, the present invention prevents overhead of setting up data channels by having the data channels already set up and waiting for data frames to arrive. Between active data transmissions, frequency spectrum resources used by the transmitter may be shared with other users to more efficiently utilize the frequency spectrum.